Crisis Management
How Crisis Management Can Change Your Business
Crisis management is the process of preparing for and managing any disruptive or unexpected emergency situations that affect your business, stakeholders, employees, customers, and revenue. Crisis management is an important component of public relations. If your business faces a crisis of any kind and isn’t equipped with a crisis management plan detailing how you’ll handle the situation, it’s likely you’ll experience serious and long-lasting consequences. These consequences might be related to various legal, operational, and public relations issues. Depending on the extent of the damage, a crisis situation could even put you out of business.
Simply, put all businesses should have a crisis management plan in place to be prepared for any unplanned event and prevent long-term damage from happening as a result.
Examples of Crisis
Financial crisis
Acts of malevolence
Technological crisis
Misplaced management values
Personnel crisis
Human-made disasters
Crises of confrontation
Acts of deception
Organizational crisis
Management misconduct
Benefits of Crisis Management for your organization
Creating an effective crisis management helps an organization to employ skillful planning, mitigation, and a proactive response to prevent a crisis entirely, limit its severity and duration, or turn it into an opportunity. Furthermore, the importance of effective and successful crisis management appears not only in sparing the organization from large losses or collapse, but also in returning the organization to a level of equilibrium before the crisis. Preparing for crisis helps organizations recover quickly and smoothly from unexpected events ensuring, and gains many benefits, including:
Protection of assets
Improves organization Morale
Reduced downtime
Protection of reputation
Reduced financial losses
Define how the plan should activate
Identify More Potential Threats
Set out a clear chain of command
Create A Culture of communication
Stages of Crisis Management
While it is important to identify risks and plan ways to reduce these risks and their effects, it is equally important to establish monitoring systems that can provide early warning signals for any crisis that can be anticipated. There are three general stages in the monitoring systems :
Pre-Crisis
Develop and practice ways to respond to various crisis scenarios
Identify risks and plans for ways to minimize those risks
Establish monitoring or early warning systems
Develop crisis response plan
Identify someone to act as a crisis manager
Crisis Response
Execute the organization’s crisis response plan
Crisis management team training
Crisis manager communicates with employees and the public
Post-Crisis
Review, adjust, and update the response plan for the future
The crisis manager continues to meet with the crisis management team
Revisit the crisis response plan to evaluate and revise it if needed